


somewhere far beyond

by janie_tangerine



Category: Captain America (Movies), Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Dark Tower - Stephen King, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Crossover, Disturbing Themes, Eldritch, Horror, I Don't Even Know, Lovecraftian Monster(s), M/M, Memory Alteration, Tentacles, Tumblr Ask Box Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-14 22:36:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16921719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/pseuds/janie_tangerine
Summary: in which Hydra and Steve Rogers aren’t the only people who are looking for the Winter Soldier.





	somewhere far beyond

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY SO a while ago (... 2014? lol, it was the year CATWS was released THE MEMORIES) I was taking halloween/horror-related prompts and I was asked _a piece centered on Bucky where the constant mindwipes and torture and HYDRA experiments gives him ability to observe 'reality beyond reality' (example. The Great God Pan, Lovecraftian horror, King's "N" etc.) He was so deeply controlled it never scared or disturbed him too much... but now that he's on the run and recovering things are quite different. (SUPER BONUS POINTS if he's unsure whether any of it is real or just his mind giving in.)_ Now... since King's Most Important Villain Ever is canonically a face of Nyarlathotep which meant I could put that together with Lovecraftian horror I went for it and I 100% forgot to repost it properly but now that tumblr is committing suicide I was looking back into the stuff I hadn't reposted, found it and figured I'd put it back up here for safekeeping. BUCKY I'M HONESTLY SORRY.
> 
> Also: the title is from Blind Guardian and I own exactly nothing - the MCU characters are ofc marvel's and randall flagg is stephen king's and now I'll saunter back downwards again. /o\

The thing is –

The asset – no, it’s not right. Bucky – no, that’s not right either.

The Soldier can’t remember if it always was like this or not.

He walks into an abandoned barn way beyond city limits where he had figured he wouldn’t be followed at least for a day, stares for a few seconds at the black, thick darkness in the far corner of the one room offered, and wonders –

_Was it always like this_? Because there’s something  _sick_  coming off that side of the room. He can almost  _feel_  it, he can almost see dark tendrils slowly lifting up from that small, specific corner, he can smell something rotten coming from that direction, and it was the same in the Smithsonian.

That was what had made him run after fifteen minutes of staring at James Buchanan Barnes’s picture.

He turns his back on the room and doesn’t quite run outside the barn.

He’ll find someplace else, he thinks.

He ends up not finding anyplace else, and so he climbs on a tree and rests on a fairly big branch for a few hours – just enough to get the minimum rest he can afford himself.

Then he has to leave.

The thing is – the tree is safe. It feels safe. Somewhat. But – there’s  _something_  else wrong. He doesn’t look up at the sky – it’s a moonless night and he’s not sure it’s a good idea.

-–

The rotten smell follows him.

It’s  _everywhere_ he goes.

Sometimes it’s barely there, at others it’s so strong he almost wants to throw up, and it doesn’t help that he had to set his arm on his own and he’s sure he did a bad job of it. It  _hurts_ , but he can hardly ask for help, can he?

The Soldier walks on and tries to think.

–-

The memories are coming back, somehow. Fairly quick, also. There’s almost nothing whole – it’s all bits and pieces, but  _a lot_  of bits and pieces. It has to be that he has not gone into  _maintenance_  for more than two days.

( _Two days at most. He’s always unpredictable after that. Never let more than two days go without a wipe_ , they said at one point.  _The machine could malfunction –_ )

He  _thinks_  it wasn’t like this at the beginning.

He  _thinks_  he wasn’t familiar with that rotten smell until at least –

( _he can’t remember the year, he doesn’t know the year, he knows it was maybe the tenth time they used the chair, maybe_ )

– he doesn’t  _know._

But he thinks that it’s not – not  _unfamiliar._

He sees that darkness looming at the corners, everywhere he looks at, even during the day. He couldn’t put into words. He doesn’t know how you can  _see darkness_  in broad daylight, but it’s just there. Along with the putrid smell.

It just – it just never bothered him much. It just was there.

After all, a machine wouldn’t have minded the difference, would it?

Would it?

The Soldier doesn’t sleep for a week, after the tree.

On the seventh day, he’s in Kentucky, somewhere in the middle of a field, and he doesn’t want to sleep here, even if his body is clamoring for it. He can barely keep his eyes open, but a field is too open,

( _and if you cut one head two of them will grow back and Hydra will be forever looking for him and he doesn’t know much but he knows he doesn’t want to go back_ )

and he can’t defend himself, and so he’s trying not to collapse and to find a better place to grab at least half an hour of rest, when that putrid smell gets stronger and all of a sudden he cannot see anything because he’s in the middle of the thickest fog he can remember seeing.

There’s a voice that sounds like his own but belongs to maybe someone else that says in his head,  _who ever fucking head of fog in fucking Kentucky at this time of the year_ , and then he raises his right hand to it and –

And it’s not  _fog._  It looks like it, but it’s cold and flaccid to the touch, almost slimy, and the smell is  _so strong_ , and all of a sudden it feels like there’s something attaching itself to its body and –

The Soldier runs.

He runs with his eyes closed until he breathes air that is – not fresh, but not  _rotten_  either, and when he opens his eyes he’s on his knees in the middle of another field and he knows he’s not going to sleep tonight at all.

–-

When he finally manages to sleep, it lasts barely one hour before he wakes up screaming.

He cannot remember the dream exactly, but he wishes is was Hydra – he had a few dreams about the chair in the first few days.

But what he had seen in his dream was some horrid, disgusting mass as slimy as that fog had been, reaching out towards him with long, equally slimy tentacles

( _that looked so much like snakes, no, like long, long necks of a hydra reaching out for him all over again_ )

and then he wakes up to a sky that isn’t just dark with a few stars, he wakes up to a sky that is  _completely absolutely pitch black with not a single source of light he’s surrounded by it and he thinks he’s always seen something like it whenever he looked up at the sky but he never realized it and it’s saying gibberish he doesn’t understand and –_

the Soldier screams.

–-

The thing –

Is that he doesn’t know if it’s real.

That he’s been seeing those dark shapes and that he’s smelled  _it_ , whatever it is, for a good thirty years unless he was in a cryochamber, doesn’t mean a thing.

It’s been a month.

He’s remembered enough to know that his head’s been screwed with six ways to Sunday (that’s what that voice that maybe he thinks could be his always says). He could have lost it back then. He could still be losing it now.

The Soldier bites into the hot dog he stole from a vendor in LA, wishing that he could feel even just a bit warm because the weather  _is_  warm, but no – he’s still feeling cold down to his bones, and it’s not just because he hasn’t thawed off seventy years of cryo chamber. It’s because everything is somewhat  _darker_  than it should be, and it’s because cold is oozing out of the shadows of the houses, and because if he looks up at the sky he can feel that dark mass hovering above him –

There’s a television in the bar he saunters into. He just wants to sit down for a bit even if it’s darker inside and it means the smell is stronger and he can picture every shadow in the area reaching out for him to drag him –

Where?

The Soldier doesn’t know. He shudders.

The television is on. Tony Stark is being interviewed. He says that as much as he wants to tell them, he can’t say where Captain America ended up after DC – _he’s off doing his own business._

For a moment, the Soldier thinks,  _maybe I could let them catch up to me._

He might be wondering if he’s gone insane or not, but he’s not  _stupid._  He knows Rogers and the winged man he threw off the Helicarrier are on his trail. And he hasn’t let them catch up to him for the same reasons why he doesn’t let himself dwell on those fragmented memories he has of a skinny, blonde boy with a split lip who once looked at him like he hung the moon because he fought off some assholes who were beating him up. Or of the equally skinny young man with whom he had shared a bed for years, or of that same skinny punk always getting into trouble. Or of hands that a serum hadn’t changed running through his hair both before and after –

No.

He can’t let himself think about that because in those memories everything is  _normal_  and there’s no putrid smell or slimy fog or  _living, breathing darkness_  and he doesn’t want to mar them, and anyway he’s not the person –

The Soldier stands up and leaves.

He can’t let them catch up to him.

If they don’t know, well, better.

He takes a bus to Las Vegas.

In retrospective, he couldn’t have had a worst idea.

–-

He realizes something is  _very_  wrong the moment he sets foot outside the bus.

The problem is that he’s at the end of the rope – he has slept maybe three hours in a week and  _enhanced_  or not, he can’t postpone it anymore.  _Wrong_  or not, he has to eat and sleep and then maybe he can hightail out of this city and disappear in the desert.

He steals food from a Chinese restaurant, then he also steals a wallet from a businessman who looks like someone who can afford to lose it and uses the money in it to pay for a room at the first hotel he finds.

He tries not to vomit as he eats – the sweet smell of the Chinese food clashes with the putrid stench rising from every shadow around him.

When his head hits the pillow, he falls asleep before he can check all the blind spots in the room.

If only  _that_  was the biggest issue.

–-

He dreams he’s in Vegas, all right.

But at the same time, Vegas is empty. Eerily empty.

He grabs a newspaper from the trashcan near him – it says,  _June 26 th, 1980, Captain Trips kills thousands._

The Soldier throws the newspaper away, thinking  _I’m really going crazy, 1980 is long gone, what is Captain Trips anyway, and why is this place so dark_ , and then he sees  _him._

He wakes up at once, screaming himself hoarse.

_And he remembers._

He barely manages to run to the small, cramped bathroom before he vomits all of his hardly ingested food into the toilet.

–-

He had forgotten the dark man.

But now that he thinks about it, he was  _always_  there.

He was there whenever he completed a mission. He was there when he made sure Howard Stark’s car would malfunction. He was there when Captain A – when Rogers – when St – when  _Captain America_ recognized him. He was there in Dallas and he was there in the Gulf and he was there in Iraq and he was there  _everywhere_ and he always talked to him, always asked if he was willing to hear a pal out, and the Soldier had never even given him a second look –

Same as he hadn’t cared about the darkness or the smell or everything else –

But now he  _remembers_  and he doesn’t want to remember any more but the thing is that he has to –

And  _why_ , why does that man with jeans, worn-out boots, that jacket with the pins attached to it and the flyers falling off his pockets, look like a bastardized version of Steve Rogers?

Or better – not  _like_  him. But – he has the blonde hair, and the blue eyes, and the pale skin, and somehow he smiles similarly, but he’s  _wrong_ , and it’s an evil smile, and the Soldier vomits again before passing out on the floor.

-–

He holds off sleeping for another three days but then he has to collapse in another dingy motel room, every dark corner of it whispering in that gibberish of a language he can’t understand and smelling like a decomposing corpse.

He dreams that he’s in Las Vegas.

“You left  _way_  too early, Soldier,” the dark man says, and the Soldier tries not to look at him in the eyes when he appears right next to him.

“Go away,” the Soldier rasps, trying to sound firm and collected. He can’t quite manage it.

“But you haven’t even heard my offer! I waited years for you, you might as well hear it out.”

The Soldier can’t help it – he raises his eyes upwards, meets the stranger’s, and feels like his stomach might turn on itself all over again. The man is smiling, in a way that would almost look welcoming on anyone else. But it looks as fake as the smile on the yellow, rounded pin attached to his jacket.

“Years?”

“Indeed. You see, I saw at once that you might be a magnificent ally, but sadly – well, you weren’t exactly a smooth talker when we met. It was sometimes in the Seventies. Then again, I suppose a machine wouldn’t be that great of a conversationalist.”

The Soldier flinches. Nothing wrong on that front.

“Haven’t you read the newspaper?”

The same blasted newspaper of last time’s shows up in the Soldier’s hands.

He reads it.

“The  _flu_?” He finally blurts out.

“What better way to go about it? So banal, but at the same time quite poetic, don’t you think? Of course, this didn’t happen where you come from.  _Yet._ ”

The Soldier drops the newspaper and looks at his left –

Just to end up facing a cross. An empty cross. But one whose purpose can be only crucifixion.

“Oh,  _that._  Well, nothing runs smooth when trying to rebuild a civilization, would it? This was one of the ways I  _had_  to deal with certain people. But then again, I did not have the right help back then.”

The man stares straight at the Soldier and all of a sudden everything is  _cold_  all over again.

Well.  _Colder._

“And you want  _mine_?”

“You would be  _quite_  the ally, Winter Soldier.”

“No.”

“How quick to refuse. Don’t you think that it’s all there is to my offer.”

“I’m not interested.”

His voice isn’t as steady as he’d like.

“Not even if I give you Rogers?”

The Soldier’s head snaps to his left.

“What –”

“Winter Soldier, you aren’t a hard man to read. I even look a bit like him, don’t I?”

“How –”

“You can have him. After all, you two  _surely_  would survive any flu, wouldn’t you? Think about that. After all, he would follow you anywhere. It wouldn’t be hard to convince him, and even if it were – I think I can be  _quite_  the charmer.”

The man smiles, showing a row of pearly white teeth.

The Soldier looks at the cross again, and –

And he sees  _himself_  hung on it, hair falling all over his face, the right side of his body covered in blood, metal and circuitry sprouting out of his left hand which is also nailed to that cross, and he wakes up screaming all over again, and for a blessed moment he thinks that it’s over for now, maybe –

“I also can be patient, if I choose to,” the man says from his left, and he smiles again before disappearing, and it’s night outside, and there’s  _darkness_  everywhere, tendrils of it reaching forwards and chanting low in that language that he doesn’t understand at all –

He grabs his meager backpack, jumps out of the window and runs.

–-

“You won’t be able to run forever, but the moment you decide to reason, you know I’ll be here!”

_No_ , the Soldier thinks.

It’s useless.

–-

He’s everywhere the Soldier goes.

Always asking,  _Winter Soldier, how about we sit down and discuss this?_

The first time someone in his vicinities sneezes out loud, the Soldier turns pale as a sheet and runs. He vomits in an alleyway. Somehow, everything smells equally rotten.

He always dreams of Las Vegas.

He’s  _never_  not nailed on that cross, and of course he would be, because where else would he belong?

–-

He resorts to walking along highways.

It changes nothing. And the man is always  _there_. Hell, he seems even more at ease.

He  _feels_  darkness coming out of that leather jacket. He never answers the taunts.

The day the man says, “I am willing to wait, but I also am Legion, and you should not forget,” the Soldier collapses on his knees in the middle of the road, and he thinks,  _I’m going to die. It doesn’t matter if this is all real or if I’m making it all up, but I’m going to die._

Somehow, he’s fine with it.

He’s just not fine with not ever seeing Steve again, but –

No. He can’t.

Steve is a  _lot_  better off without him and everything else he brings.

–-

Except that the Las Vegas dreams are  _too much_.

He can’t function without even that little sleep he had before, and he gets sloppy, and after three weeks of dreaming about crucifixions, of rotten smell getting even more pungent, of wanting to suffocate at every dark corner he passes by, of a constant  _if you come with me you shall rule the world_ litany and of crippling fear whenever he hears someone cough, he’s at the end of his rope.

Or, of the line.

_Yeah, ain’t that appropriate_.

“I don’t see why you have to put yourself through this,” the dark man says.

“Go away,” the Soldier pleads, on his knees in the middle of a deserted highway somewhere in Colorado. He has stopped paying attention. The asphalt is burning under his right hand and he can  _see_ the dark tendrils reach out from the inside of the dark man’s jacket.

“Why should I? As you can see, I am hardly a quitter, Winter Soldier. Just say yes. You have all to gain from it. And I keep my promises.”

“No,” he says, but his voice is feebler by the moment.

“No point in wasting all your potential. Don’t you want revenge against that pathetic  _Hydra_? You say yes, you’ll have all of their heads in no time. You can even dispose of them personally – I’m  _that_ generous with my friends.”

And  _that_  is tempting, but it’s not what –

It’s not what the man who once told a skinny punk with a death wish that he was with him til the end of the line would have done, and the Soldier wishes he were that man still, and he cannot –

“No.”

“Self-sacrifice doesn’t suit you, my friend. Come on, I know that you can see  _everything_. Or well, as much as a human could. Why do you think we have known each other since the seventies? You’re one of a kind, Winter Soldier. I would be a fool to let all of that potential go to waste.”

_All of that potential?_ Something that came out of the mind wipes, because there’s no other way this came to be.

“No.”

“Even if you  _know_  your precious Captain America would never take you back? Say yes and you don’t have to worry about  _that_ , ever again.”

The Soldier swallows, and the thing is that he  _really_  hopes he’s gone insane, he really hopes he’s making this all up, because the temptation to say yes is growing by the second and if he’s not mad then – then he really deserves to go up on that cross he always dreamed of and to remain there, and and and –

“Come on, someone like you would  _know_  that it’s rude to keep someone waiting for forty years. And that’s  _how long_  I waited for you, Winter Soldier.”

“Too bad I waited  _eighty_.”

The Soldier’s head snaps up at once, and –

No.

He  _has_  to be hallucinating this, because Capt – because Rogers – because  _Steve_  is standing in front of the two of them, and he actually –

He actually –

“You see him?” the Soldier asks, his voice barely audible, and this is not the way he had figured they would meet again, if ever, and Steve doesn’t look down at him, rather he looks straight at the dark man –

“How  _interesting_  a development,” the dark man interrupts. “How enchanting to meet you. A  _true_  American icon, I see. And well, I see that you would think first come first served  _might_  be acceptable in this case –”

“He goes with whoever he wants,” Steve interrupts himself. “I was merely stating that if you think forty years is long, you’re  _wrong._ ”

The Soldier looks at them.

The dark man looks –

He looks this close to  _angry_.

“Are you real?”

He doesn’t even look at the man, just straight at Steve.

And then Steve looks down at him, smiling just a bit, and he looks tired and worried out of his mind and he has dark shadows under his eyes and there are no pins on his leather jacket.

“I damn hope so,” Steve replies, and he  _sounds_  worried out of his mind other than looking it, and the Soldier should tell him to leave, except –

Except that he’s the only thing in his sight that doesn’t somehow smell rotten or look  _wrong_  or has darkness looming behind it or  _inside_  it and the Soldier is  _tired_ and –

“Winter Soldier, I don’t really think you’re making  _his_  best interest now,” that charming but  _wrong_  voice says from his left, and –

“My name is James Buchanan Barnes and you can fuck off.”

Then he reaches out with his left arm – the right hurts too much and he can see that his fingers got thinner and they’d shake and he doesn’t want that – and Steve grabs his hand at once, those strong fingers wrapping around his own without even thinking about it, and the dark man lets out a disappointed scream and disappears, but Bucky doesn’t see it because he’s too busy staring at Steve as he hauls him up and –

 

( _a long time later Bruce Banner will sit in front of him with a scan monitoring his cerebral activity and telling him that it looks like he’s not using 100% of his brain capacity like anyone else but more like the equivalent of 170%, and yes it’s definitely tied to whatever Hydra did to him, but it does_ not _mean that he’s going insane or that he already has, and can he describe his symptoms again, and what had he said about that flu epidemic?, and Bucky will answer as truthfully as he can and he’ll tell him that there are shadows everywhere in the lab and all of them smell wrong but_ he _smells right, and Banner’s eyes will go wide, and he’ll take notes carefully, and the hissing coming from the shadows in the corner won’t be just monotone but legitimate_ angry _, and Bucky’s left hand will be almost crushing Steve’s in his grip as words leave his mouth, and he’ll say that he never asked for it and he needs it to stop and does it really mean he isn’t seeing things?, and Steve will say,_ I did see that creep with the leather jacket, didn’t I? _, and Banner will say_ well your brain runs at the equivalent of 110% so it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to think you might have seen some of what  _he_  sees,  _and Bucky will be grateful that out of everything Steve only saw the dark man who hasn’t appeared again since the highway in Colorado and he’ll think that however this ends at least he’s going to the end of the line with Steve wherever and whatever it is_ )

 

He can barely keep himself upward the moment his legs straighten out, and Steve’s arm goes around his waist, and he lets his forehead fall on Steve’s shoulder, breathing him in and he smells  _right_  – not rotten or putrid or  _dark_ , and he could cry if only he had enough strength.

“Sorry to have kept you waitin’ that long,” he blurts against Steve’s shoulder, the leather of his jacket so very soft and non-threatening under his cheek.

“I’d have waited another eighty.” Steve’s voice is almost choked as a hand reaches up and cards through Bucky’s filthy hair. His fingers are shaking.

All of Bucky is shaking for that matter.

He closes his eyes, the hissing coming from all around him becoming a background noise even if  _it doesn’t go away_

( _and_   _it never will, he knows somewhere deep down, because it’s older than him and it will be there after he dies and he doesn’t know how he knows but he just does_ )

and then he lets himself sleep.

 

End.


End file.
